Merry Christmas from The Grand Duchy of Stollen

Merry Christmas to Jeff Hudelson, Paul Robinson, Greg Horne, Murdock, and to everyone else who regularly visits the Grand Duchy. The Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II and the Grand Duchess Sonja send all of you the very best wishes for the season, including good health, family, and hope for the coming year.

Merry Christmas!!!

Comments

Anonymous said…

Festive Yule greetings to all at the Grand Duchy of Stollen.

12:29 PM

Bluebear Jeff said…

Thank you for your kind sentiments. Rest assured that my dear lady wife and I return the like thoughts to you and the lovely Sonja.

-- Jeff & Lani

12:39 PM

Anonymous said…

Festive Greetings and Seasons wishes to you and yours Stokes.

4:40 AM

Anonymous said…

God Jul from the Grand Duchess of Schleiz and her Lady-in-Waiting. We are touring through the area and wanted to say that we are impressed with the architecture. You must be using the same designer as my late husband did when he helped his cousin construct the new portion of Szczecin after the fire.

7:27 PM

And We're Off!!!

Arrrgh! Gotta go back into camera settings on my iPhone to bring all of the frame into focus. Blast! Painting is underway on the 60 or so Minden Austrians, which are slated to become my version of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment of AWI renown. More or less indistinguishable from Austrians of the era really, right down to the red facings and turnbacks, but the eventual flags (already in my files) will set them apart. I went ahead and based-coated all of them over a couple of days lthe last week of August, using a mix of light gray and white acrylic gesso, before next applying my usual basic alkyd oil flesh tone to the faces and hands. In a day or two, I'll hit that with Army Painter Flesh Wash to tone things down a bit and bring some definition to the faces and hands. As usual, the plan is to focus on about 20 figures at a time, splitting the regiment roughly into thirds along with the color party and regimental staff. Depending on ...

Sunday Morning Coffee with AI. . .

A rmed with a second cup of fresh, strong coffee, I messed around a bit this morning with artlist.io using its image to image function in an attempt to convert my hand-drawn map from September 2006 to something that more resembles an old map from the mid-18th century. And just like my experiments with Ninja AI in June, the results are mixed. The above map is pretty good, but Artlist keeps fouling up the place names and has trouble putting a faint overlay of hexes across the entire area. Hexes, admittedly, are not likely to be found on any genuine maps from the era in question, but there we are. Frankly, I prefer the appearance of the Ninja map, but there were problems getting it to correct its errors. Grrrr. As is the case with so much having to do with the various AI's out there now, the output generated is a direct result of the prompts entered. For text alone, and when you develop a lengthy, highly detailed prompt, it is...

Continued Regional Map Revisions. . .

F ooled around a bit more with the revised map just before and after dinner this evening, using the Fotor app to reinsert missing text . I also removed a few other things using the 'Magic Eraser' function, which works surprisingly well. Now, we're getting somewhere. I just have to figure out how to ensure that the text is all a uniform font style and maybe figure out a way to add a few bunches of trees to suggest forested areas, Ninja AI is not always entirely cooperative to the tune of "I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that." -- Stokes

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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